Sleep hasn’t been coming so easily lately. Not certain why — lawd knows I’m friggin’ exhausted.
Yesterday was an emotionally draining day. I’ve never been able to attend an off-site work function, and damn it, I was going to change that yesterday. I am the first one to tell people that no one will value their time unless they do it first, but it’s been challenging to practice what I’ve preached because that means reversing the course of the floods, in some cases.
Me being able to make a 12:30 luncheon was contingent upon three people hitting deadline. Not being early, mind you. Being ON TIME.
One hit deadline. One phoned it in (read: half-assed it and I couldn’t use it anyway and had to do something dramatically different). One forgot about me till 1:30 when we made special arrangements that I’d do the work after I came back from the party. Remember, all I wanted for Christmas was a lunch hour. Nobody ever went ahead and asked that I would get to go home when everybody else did!
Anyway, what impressed me wasn’t the magnificence of Maggiano’s food or the fact that the world won’t end if I actually see daylight, but that several VIPs across the company actually CARED that I made it. That there is such a wonderful circle of people who are looking out for me and who were rooting for me to orchestrate an escape. That yeah, I was over an hour late, but that they were thrilled to see me anyway.
You guys have no idea how happy that makes me, and how guilty I feel after going all “Milton Waddams” all morning because my cheese keeps getting moved and I wasn’t going to get a piece of cake and why don’t they just move my desk into the middle of a river, blah blah blah. 🙂
But I see that maybe I don’t deserve to go to these events because I just start being a bitch in my head. We’re known for giving away lots of prizes. I’ve never won any. I probably never will. I always see the same people winning them and don’t really think much of it.
What gets me though is knowing how much my team busts its ass and how everyone’s logging 70-hour weeks and how none of us ever gets that little special recognition. Now, I don’t want to begrudge the winners, because I was genuinely happy and clapped heartily for some of them, but I will admit that I found my wine glass or coffee spoon utterly FASCINATING when I see people winning just by luck of the draw when the REAL luck is just getting to work with them. *barf*
Someone was very rude to me on the phone yesterday till I mentioned that I had a V.P. sitting in my office, awaiting their answer on speakerphone. I hope that it was noted how their tone changed into a fucking sing-song once I name-dropped. And to see that person getting a prize was challenging, to say the least.
Someone made an innocent comment that they didn’t think upper-echelon staff should be eligible for the prizes. You know what, one of my VPs got a prize and the senior VP in my department could take home all 30 of the prizes and I still would have clapped my little heart out. I’d rather use gifts as a REWARD as opposed to a PURE CHANCE thing.
What can I say? I’m a socialist. Gifts for everybody! 😉
I don’t know. I guess I just want my people to get more than extra projects thrown at them as a reward for their competence and congeniality … that I am rooting for them the way so many people are rooting for me.
But I don’t want to knock it — my great reward was time … MY TIME … and getting to use some of it the way I wanted to.
Don’t worry — I won’t get accustomed to the feeling because I have no idea when the next time will be that I get to do what I want, when I want. But for those of you who wonder why I have an absolute inability to make/stick to plans? It’s because if I see a window to not be committed to anybody/anything, I always try to take it … even if it’s just for a few moments.